Tristram Hunt: What have the Germans ever done for us..?
[Tristram Hunt's biography of Engels, The Frock-coated Communist, is published by Penguin on May 1.]
What could be more British than Handel's Messiah, Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII or a traditional Christmas Day? With museums, concert halls and opera houses commemorating the 250th anniversary of Georg Friedrich Handel's death on April 14, 1759, this seems the right moment to remember the signal contribution of German culture to British identity. An appreciation all too often obliterated today by our obsession with the Nazis.
Few embody that Germanic shaping of Britishness more than Handel. He arrived on the tailcoats of his royal patron, the Elector of Hanover, Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig-Luneburg, better known as George I. And his compositions reflected an increasingly confident sense of national destiny as Britain - a Protestant nation in a predominantly Catholic Europe, committed to parliamentary governance, liberty and the rule of law - was projected by royal propagandists as a Promised Land, a new Israel. Brought across the sea by another Protestant wind, the Hanoverian dynasty was part of that story of redemption and deliverance from Jacobite darkness.
So Handel's music compared events in British history with the narratives of the Old Testament. The oratorio Israel in Egypt and Zadok the Priest, Handel's 1727 Coronation anthem for George II, which has been played at every subsequent crowning, are the most adulatory. “It was because he celebrated Britain in this glowing fashion,” the historian Linda Colley says, “that Handel became such a national institution.”
In Dissenting chapels, choral societies, cathedral concerts and in Westminster Abbey itself, Handel became the composer of Britishness.
The next royal infusion of Teutonic blood - Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - resulted in a further layering of German culture. Reviled by the English aristocracy as worthy and dour, Prince Albert did more than just introduce fir trees into British Christmas ritual. His management of the 1851 Great Exhibition, presidency of the Royal Society of Arts and establishment of the South Kensington Museums signalled a new class settlement. Albert brought a little bit of German admiration for the bürgerlich ethic into Britain: after decades of haughty disdain, the technically-minded, commercially- savvy provincial bourgeoisie became part of our national story. And Albert endowed some of Britain's finest cultural institutions.
Even more so than Hanoverian England, the 19th century was the age of enthusiasm for all things German. Inspired by the writings of Herder and the poetry of Schiller, Coleridge and the Lake Poets disavowed the Enlightenment and dwelt on the uniqueness and particularity of national culture, language and landscape. Meanwhile, Marian Evans (better known as George Eliot) translated Ludwig Feuerbach and his fellow philosopher David Strauss into English, lacing their philosophy through her novels.
But the polemicist and historian Thomas Carlyle, from his beautifully appointed drawing room at Cheyne Row, Chelsea (with its twin portrait of Martin Luther's parents on the wall), most effectively diffused German Romanticism into British culture. In the writings of Richter and Goethe, he found a spiritualism and naturalism to counter “the inner emptiness, the untruthfulness of the age”. Unfortunately one of Carlyle's greatest admirers was Adolf Hitler, who had Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great read to him during his final hours in the bunker...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
What could be more British than Handel's Messiah, Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII or a traditional Christmas Day? With museums, concert halls and opera houses commemorating the 250th anniversary of Georg Friedrich Handel's death on April 14, 1759, this seems the right moment to remember the signal contribution of German culture to British identity. An appreciation all too often obliterated today by our obsession with the Nazis.
Few embody that Germanic shaping of Britishness more than Handel. He arrived on the tailcoats of his royal patron, the Elector of Hanover, Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig-Luneburg, better known as George I. And his compositions reflected an increasingly confident sense of national destiny as Britain - a Protestant nation in a predominantly Catholic Europe, committed to parliamentary governance, liberty and the rule of law - was projected by royal propagandists as a Promised Land, a new Israel. Brought across the sea by another Protestant wind, the Hanoverian dynasty was part of that story of redemption and deliverance from Jacobite darkness.
So Handel's music compared events in British history with the narratives of the Old Testament. The oratorio Israel in Egypt and Zadok the Priest, Handel's 1727 Coronation anthem for George II, which has been played at every subsequent crowning, are the most adulatory. “It was because he celebrated Britain in this glowing fashion,” the historian Linda Colley says, “that Handel became such a national institution.”
In Dissenting chapels, choral societies, cathedral concerts and in Westminster Abbey itself, Handel became the composer of Britishness.
The next royal infusion of Teutonic blood - Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - resulted in a further layering of German culture. Reviled by the English aristocracy as worthy and dour, Prince Albert did more than just introduce fir trees into British Christmas ritual. His management of the 1851 Great Exhibition, presidency of the Royal Society of Arts and establishment of the South Kensington Museums signalled a new class settlement. Albert brought a little bit of German admiration for the bürgerlich ethic into Britain: after decades of haughty disdain, the technically-minded, commercially- savvy provincial bourgeoisie became part of our national story. And Albert endowed some of Britain's finest cultural institutions.
Even more so than Hanoverian England, the 19th century was the age of enthusiasm for all things German. Inspired by the writings of Herder and the poetry of Schiller, Coleridge and the Lake Poets disavowed the Enlightenment and dwelt on the uniqueness and particularity of national culture, language and landscape. Meanwhile, Marian Evans (better known as George Eliot) translated Ludwig Feuerbach and his fellow philosopher David Strauss into English, lacing their philosophy through her novels.
But the polemicist and historian Thomas Carlyle, from his beautifully appointed drawing room at Cheyne Row, Chelsea (with its twin portrait of Martin Luther's parents on the wall), most effectively diffused German Romanticism into British culture. In the writings of Richter and Goethe, he found a spiritualism and naturalism to counter “the inner emptiness, the untruthfulness of the age”. Unfortunately one of Carlyle's greatest admirers was Adolf Hitler, who had Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great read to him during his final hours in the bunker...